CERN, the Big Bang and Impact On the IT Industry

whencanistop writes "ComputerWeekly have put together a nice short guide (with lots of links) of what is going on at CERN. They've got a nice slant though on what this big bang experiment is going to mean for the IT Industry. Interesting slant on the world's largest grid and the database clustering technology that they are using. They have also picked up on the amusing rap video by CERN's scientists that has been wandering around YouTube."

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Gromius]

trust me its not fun. Physicists are demanding, require unreasonable ungodly amounts of storage and computing power and will do whater the hell they like with it, usally fecking up the system in new and interesting ways. Even the grid isnt enough, we could use more cpu. I'm a physicist at cern (posting from the CMS control room, was there yestarday, twas exciting) and I wouldnt want to be my sys admin ;)

Incidently offtopic, the LHC is down at the moment and has been all day. Apparently its something about a lost patrol.

Please please!

[Fallen Andy]

Don't call it the "god particle" (Peter Higgs is an atheist just like his hero Paul Dirac).

(Apparently it was originally "goddammned particle" but someone edited a manuscript...).

Andy

Re:nice summary

[whencanistop]

It is so that people with too puny a mind to understand the subject can comment on the spelling rather than the subject matter.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Gromius]

I think you now start to see the extent of the problem. Seriously the sys admins are the outgoing ones at my work :)

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Gromius]

No I'm with the parent. And I'm coming for the user/scientist side. The admins at scientific labs like CERN are basically doing a heroic job despite the best efforts of their users to be as awkward as possible.

He's right, its almost impossible to get physicists to do what you want and by god if it goes down theres hell to pay, even if it *them* who brought it down doing something the admins told them not to. Admins cant really lock anything down and if they try to its circumvented and/or bitterly complained about. Plus they have to allow the user to run whatever programs they want as they mainly use (very poorly written) custom code. It all boils down to physicists being obsessed about their research to the point that getting it done is the *most important* thing and all else pales into significance.

Again I mention that I'm physicist and I know I'm guilty of this, I've taken down the UK particle physics cluter farm (the tier 1 in grid speak) but these days I usually buy them a beer afterwards to make up for it.

Hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

So they want to recreate "The Big Bang".

I have no doubts that they will learn something from this study (they'd better considering the price of this thing!)

BUT it seems foolish to promote this study around the concept of the Big Bang when that is a HIGHLY contested theory that is statistically and conceptually almost impossible to have occurred and resulted in our current society at total random chance.

Why don't they instead promote the study around many of the other important things they have the potential to discover?

And their video is LAME. I prefer to stereotype the scientists on this project as ultra serious super-intelligent researchers, not a bunch of Youtube dorks, thank you very much.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[UncleTogie]

This is why I am a mathematician and not a scientist. So much science is high priced sensationalist bullcrap....

Silly question: If you're NOT a scientist, how can you tell it's high-priced sensationalist bullcrap, especially the more esoteric work?